Write Your Own Geospatial Utilities - Open Source Geospatial Tools: Applications in Earth Observation - page 213

Fig. 14.1 A typical geospatial processing chain using the GDAL/OGR API
The core of the processing resides in the lower levels, with the utilities typically
performing algorithmic tasks. The performance of the code at these levels is more
critical and a compiled language, such as C or C++ is preferred.
From the perspective of a geospatial programmer, the GDAL andOGR application
programming interfaces make your life easier and simplify many tasks. In general,
programmers dealing with geospatial data will agree that, apart from very highly
complex processing algorithms, data management requires the most attention when
programming a new utility. This involves opening, reading, writing and closing data
in a number of different formats. One of the key advantages of the API is that it